PREMIERE: Silver Torches Hit the Old Dusty Trail in “If I Reach” Video

The touring member of Perfume Genius sets his song to simmer.

Erik Walters has something to say. The musician, who records under the name Silver Torches, has been sowing the long, hard road into adulthood, and his new album, Let It Be A Dream, he offers glimpses of what he’s seen along the path.

The answer? A lot of ambiguity and fitful progress, which will surprise approximately nobody who’s ever tried to change or loved someone who has. In “If I Reach,” whose video we’re premiering today, Walters wanders through a lush soundscape, his voice pillowing over a steady acoustic strum until it blossoms into a bright chorus. “If I reach out my hand to you,” he sings, not finishing the thought.

In addition to playing with David Bazan, Walters tours with Perfume Genius, and while it may be a bit too tidy to say that his own music splits the difference between Bazan’s angular folk and Mike Hadreas’s defiant grandiosity, there is a crack to “If I Reach” that summons that chorus to attention and causes it to fall in line before it drifts into a dream in a way that recalls the best of both of those musicians’ work.

The clip was directed by Ben Park, who picked up on Walters’s questing and sent him out on a path of his own. “The song immediately conjured the heat of the dusty road,” Park says, “and that’s where we began. From there we followed, to see where the road would lead us. The resulting experience was an adventure in searching for what lies beyond the bend.”